Happy Earth Day! Today is a day to celebrate human flourishing and the ability of capitalism, innovation, and property rights to better conserve the environment than top-down mandates.
Between 1970 and 2023, the combined emissions of the six most common air pollutants dropped by 78 percent. This occurred during the same period that gross domestic product grew 321 percent, vehicle miles traveled grew 194 percent, U.S. population grew 63 percent, and energy consumption grew 42 percent.
These improvements in environmental quality were not caused by the writing down the Clean Air Act in 1963. They are thanks in large part to innovation, which spurred the technological advancements that has propelled U.S. living standards ever higher while we pollute far less than we did 55 years ago.
Take natural gas. The widespread use of hydraulic fracturing has allowed natural gas to become plentiful and cheaper, which has displaced a large portion of the U.S.’ coal electricity production. Natural gas emits half of the carbon dioxide that coal does. A consistent environmentalist movement would celebrate this and support the use of natural gas as a cleaner alternative to coal. (An even more consistent environmentalist movement would support more nuclear power, as American Experiment does, because it emits zero carbon-dioxide while operating at a reliable baseload source, with a higher energy density, lesser land use, and manageable waste disposal).
The federal government has renewed its focus on domestic production of energy resources, including oil, natural gas, and critical minerals — and that is a great thing for the environment. The U.S. has strict environmental regulations on mining and energy production, but the same cannot be said of many other countries. Offshoring the production of the materials needed for modern life to foreign countries merely offshores the environmental consequences. Additionally, several funds supported directly by natural resource developers help to improve public lands and the National Parks system.
Maintaining a healthy planet and decent standards of living for humans can only be done through conservation, or the wise use of natural resources. Yet the environmentalist movement has adopted a no-use preservationist ethos that relies on top-down government mandates to change consumer behavior. This seldom results in the best outcomes for the environment or the people closest to the problem.
Consider forest management. After a devastating fire in 1910, the fledgling U.S. Forest Service made its mission to put out fires at all costs, ignoring the role that small wildfires play in clearing out underbrush. Today, forests are unnaturally dense tinderboxes, yet federal permitting processes mean that the Forest Service is delayed by three to five years on average to undertake projects that mechanically thin the forests and reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires.
That is sometimes too late. The Pumice Project in California’s Klamath National Forest was put off for nearly a decade due to activist concerns about the habitat of the spotted owl. In 2021, before any work began, the Antelope Fire destroyed the same habitat that activists sought to protect. Leaving forests untouched and unspoiled by human interference for a century has given the West some of the worst wildfires in history.
Market-based solutions that come from the people closest to the problem do best in caring for the environment and promoting human flourishing, too. This Earth Day, celebrate the capitalist innovation that has brought the U.S. cleaner air, water, and environment.